The Story of Cosmetics • Campaign for Safe Cosmetics

Comments of the personal care industry, by Bob Root, Keys CTO

“The world is a changen,” is an old southern phrase.   It generally means that new things continue to appear at a little to fast a pace.   The concept of safe cosmetics does not fit into that phrase.  I believe we are actually returning to the basics and our roots from not a too distant a past.

Our first lotion was a refined version of one my grandmother created.  She taught me to make a very fine lotion that she used to simmer on the pilot light (Google ‘pilot light’ if you are under 40) on the stove. She had long since passed-on by the time I started Keys, but I remembered the formula and process. Very emollient, Tortuga rivals the department store brands at a fraction of the price. Why, because it is all natural whole ingredients and not 50+ chemicals designed to mimic a real natural lotion.

This week I will, once again, be the target of verbal abuse when Keys attends a major trade show in Las Vegas. Most there will be chemists! Engineers like me are generally not welcome. :-).    Already, the show prospectus contains meeting after meeting talking about this “new trend to natural.”  Sorry to say, it is not new and it is the chemists beginning in the 1950’s that took us off the natural path for our food and care products…especially home care products.

As the old rock sound says, ” So we just keep on keepen on!”

Most chemists hate the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics! The reason is that the effort to return to a natural lifestyle thwarts their innovation…in their minds! Creating a simple product that works to help people is far more difficult for them because it seems like going backwards in time. I believe that it is that backward motion that will help the 63% of Americans that claim to have a skin disorder. Further, I believe that many of the skin maladies are actually caused by these products by making our cell walls more permeable and in the case of parabens, kill the probiotics on our skin designed by nature to protect us.

So the war lingers on! Today, Free Range Studios (The Story of Stuff people) and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (which Keys is a member) aiedr a 7 minute video about The Story of Stuff – Cosmetics. Below is the video that I have not yet seen. We have published it here on the 21st so that we can all see what it is about. I will offer comments.

Bob Root Comments: The Story of Cosmetics Video

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

As a Keys follower, you already get the majority of this video. Don’t let that deter you from realizing how important this seminal presentation is in the effort to inform people that they have a choice. You “Get It” and it is time to help someone else “Get It!” Getting it is a relative thing because somewhere along the way each of us got it because someone shared their ideas, thoughts and feelings about safe cosmetics that caused a question in our minds. Then as we research, we learn,we know and then we are supposed to teach. It is all of us to be teachers, right!

The content of the video is the same thing that I have heard for many years and it fulfills a need to begin to get the center of the knowing public to understand. When I am speaking in California or doing an in-store demonstration, the conversations are quite different from the rest of the country. Seems like all the advocacies start or impact California first. Said, I am pleased with the video mainly because it does address the masses in a simple and understandable way.

So, when your friends ask if you have seen the video, you can no add to the content based on your knowledge as someone who gets it. Like my experiences in California, it is really nice to begin a speech with an audience that “Gets It” already. 😉

Bob